Ohio charter school system is broken and must be fixed

Ohio’s controversy-ridden charter schools may be a national joke, but they’re no laughing matter for the state’s taxpayers who are seeing more than $1 billion of their money being used to keep this failed experiment in education going.

On June 12, The Washington Post published a piece headlined, “Troubled Ohio charter schools have become a joke – literally.”

Here are the opening paragraphs to the story:

“Yes, some charter schools are great, but others are a mess – especially in Ohio, where academic results across the sector are far worse than in traditional public schools and financial and ethical scandals are more than common. How bad is the problem? The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer ran a story this year that started like this:

“‘Ohio, the charter school world is making fun of you. Ohio’s $1 billion charter school system was the butt of jokes at a conference of reporters on school choice in Denver late last week, as well as the target of sharp criticism of school failures across the state.’”

Three days after the Washington Post story spread like wildfire through the state of Ohio, there was a news release from Ohio Auditor Dave Yost’s office that carried this headline: “General Chappie James Leadership Academy Special Audit Results in $1.1 Million Finding.”

The release focused on the findings of a special audit of the now-closed General Chappie James Leadership Academy in Montgomery County. The audit revealed that officials of the school padded their attendance rolls by nearly 50 percent. Such padding resulted in more than $1 million being grabbed by the school.

“It’s no mistake when your attendance records are off by nearly half,” said Yost, who has consistently broken ranks with his fellow Republicans in state government to publicly criticize the mismanagement of charter schools in Ohio. “These findings illustrate the need for meaningful charter school reform …”

The state auditor did offer praise for the state legislators who are working to impose some common sense standards on the charter school industry.

But as we have argued for years – we opposed the creation of the community schools 18 years ago – the only solution to what ails the industry is to impose the same rules, regulations and oversight that apply to public schools.

Indeed, we are convinced that the Ohio Department of Education should control the charter schools to ensure that private operators aren’t squandering taxpayer dollars.

But we are also keenly aware that so long as Republicans control the Ohio General Assembly and there’s a Republican in the governor’s office, meaningful changes will never be embraced. The owners of the charter schools have invested millions of dollars to ensure that oversight is kept to a minimum, standards are fuzzy at best and economic and academic failure aren’t causes for losing a charter.

But the implosion of the industry has been so glaring that Republican legislators, who are unyielding in their support for school choice, have proposed some changes. To us, the changes are window dressing, at best.

Hence, we remain strong supporters of Ohio Auditor Yost, who is using his statutory powers to tighten the reins on the 390 charter schools. Yost has been adamant that the bottom line goes beyond the expenditure of public dollars. There are more than 120,000 students whose parents or guardians have bought into the idea that charters are a better alternative to public schools.

The $1.1 million finding against General Chappie James Leadership Academy in Montgomery County is only the tip of the iceberg. Not long ago, Yost’s office conducted an informal audit of 30 charter schools and found low attendance rates at half of them.

Glaringly, at the Academy for Urban Scholars in Youngstown, auditors did not find a single student in school on the day of the surprise visit.

The iceberg that is the failed charter school system in Ohio is huge, and it will remain in place so long as Republicans refuse to acknowledge what Auditor Yost and Democratic legislators, led by state Sen. Joseph Schiavoni of Boardman, the minority leader, have concluded: The system is broken, and major repairs are demanded.

Nonetheless, when the biennium budget is finally approved and signed into law, the GOP will make it a point to hail the new rules and regulations that have been adopted to control the charter.

The rules and regulations will be too little, too late.